Hello everyone. We had a historic meeting this morning. A meeting where we obviously talked about the issues that different indigenous communications are facing across the country, but we also talked a lot about the processes that we’ll initiate together to address, to resolve these problems. We are very aware that this work will go on for years, decades and maybe even generations, but it’s very important to start in the spirit of cooperation, partnership, respect and collaboration. And that’s what we agreed on this morning in an extremely productive meeting.                        

We had an extraordinary meeting this morning in which we highlighted a broad range of challenges and opportunities faced by indigenous peoples across this country.  We talked about a number of specific issues but also engaged directly on how we are going to work together collaboratively to address these problems concretely, and these opportunities concretely.

This is an engagement that is going to take years, decades, and generations perhaps, but it is important to start with a true sense of collaboration and partnership and that’s exactly what we cemented this morning.  From this moment forward there will be individual conversations with ministers, with myself, in terms of bilateral relationships looking at different initiatives.  There will also be opportunities for all of us to pull together at least yearly in meetings like this to check-in on an ongoing fashion.  But what we have started here is an ongoing nation-to-nation, Crown to Inuit relationship that we are building that goes to the whole of government, not just the Prime Minister and the Minister for Indigenous and Northern Affairs, but through all the departments, many of whom were represented by their ministers here at this meeting this morning.